Conversations by Garreth Broke

Our new conversation partner is a machine. In light of that revolution, it’s worth thinking about what it is that makes a good conversation: a respectful exchange of ideas, a willingness to learn and to change.

My Conversations EP first arose from experiments with MIDI bio-data sonification, in which a device attached to plants turns fluctuations in their galvanic conductance into MIDI data. When listening to the music generated I was struck by how, amidst the randomness, occasionally you’d hear something extraordinarily beautiful. More recently I’ve been testing out music generated by free-to-use AI music generators, Google’s Magenta in particular. It reminded me of teaching my beginner piano students to improvise: at the beginning they move their fingers randomly, but after a while they learn to craft phrases, later how to add emotion to their melodies. These three types of musical conversations—with AI, plant, and untrained human—aren't how we conventionally make music, but there's a certain random beauty to be found in all of them.

I recorded musical dialogues with three different conversation partners: Google’s Magenta AI, a houseplant attached to a MIDI bio-data sonification device, and my partner Anna, who has never taken music lessons. I guided each of them, restricting their activity to harmonically appealing notes, but otherwise I gave them free rein. I listened carefully to what they did, trying tounderstand it and to react sensitively, so that a real conversation could take place. The result is these four "conversations". Each is harmonically similar but melodically different, as if the four conversations started with the same topic but went in strikingly different directions.

Just like the music, the album artwork was a conversation. In this case we took an abstract green painting by my partner Anna and asked MidJourney to combine it with a picture of a robot playing the piano generated by my record label boss David Wenngren, aka Library Tapes. The results were weird and fascinating (see above right). We tweaked it many times until it felt like the most interesting mix of both wrong and right.

We’re at an inflection point in our history. If AI represents our future, the plant may represent our past. This EP represents an attempt to figure out what we do next.

"a sensitive and profound artist" — PianoDao

"Lovely... genuinely uplifting…" — Stationary Travels

"It's got a peculiar kind of nostalgic charm" — Elizabeth Alker, BBC Radio 3

garrethbrooke.com
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